• Cnet, Friday, November 11, 2005 12:15 PM

Cnet obtained a memo from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff to his employees that upped the stakes in the battle brewing between the old and new guard of new media. The memo was written in reaction to the one Bill Gates sent his Microsoft employees last month, describing the need to recognize the "sea change" in the way content is monetized on the Internet. The Gates memo singled out the success of Google and Salesforce.com as weather vanes of that change. Benioff's response sounds like a call to war. He heaps praise on his employees for the defeat of their closest rival PeopleSoft, which last month "surrendered, and decided to take its place beside several former competitors at software's Shady Pines Rest Home, also known as Oracle." He adds that the age of software is dead, to be replaced by Web-based services. "Now is our time to demonstrate the next level."

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